hakone - gardens: tea rooms

Hakone Gardens is fast becoming the premier tea ceremony venue in Northern California. Presently it has three dedicated tea rooms of different sizes, one of which is a nine-mat room designed a famous tea room designer in Japan. This tearoom, located in the Cultural Exchange Center, is intended both for private tea gatherings and demonstrations, allowing an audience of up to 70 guests to observe a tea ceremony. Soon Hakone Gardens will add a small tea room of only 2 mats to the outer garden area. This extremely intimate tea room will complement the other, larger, tea rooms, providing tea practitioners and teachers with a variety of tea spaces for every occasion and purpose.

For the past 19 years, Hakone has been honored to host our beloved tea instructor, Minako Tsuji. Tsuji cultivates instructional training to a loyal following of students from the Urasenke School every Friday morning in the Lower House.

A special amenity which Hakone offers is the opportunity to participate in the various tea ceremonies and classes which take place here. For the non-Japanese, the significance of the tea ceremony can seem illusive and remote. However, the tea ceremony has a rich history and dates back to when tea was first brought to Japan, from China, during the T'ang dynasty (618-905). The first recording of a formal ceremony involving tea is in the eighth century when Emperor Shoma (724-49) invited the monks, who had participated in his religious rituals, to have tea in his palace. By the 15th Century the tea ceremony was vogue among the aristocrats and other classes imitated the tea-making etiquette of the nobles. The noblesš tea ceremonies were sometimes held in grand rooms with elegant decorations. The nobles also used smaller rooms for just a few guests when they entertained. Special rooms were sometimes built specifically for this purpose and became known as kakoi.

One of the illustrative designers of smaller rooms was a Zen priest by the name of Murato Shuko (1422-1502), known as the father of the tea ceremony. Shuko contributed an important element from earlier tea masters in that he would serve his guests himself. Shuko taught his own basic concept of the art of tea and his personal outlook on aesthetics. His idea of karera, or refined simplicity, showed that Shuko took great pains to study the most aesthetic method for tea utensils. Today, there are now a wide range of tea schools and each fall Hakone hosts many of the various practitioners throughout the gardens for the annual tea gathering, Dai-Chakai.

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